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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

People will blame the technology for making it worse. But I think we have always had a problem and it's cultural and systemic, not technological.

It seems there are two extremes. Either you shut up or go to prison in some countries, or you say ANYTHING you want about the other political candidates in other countries, regardless of how misleading it is.

I think it comes from the core paradigm which is essentially a type of "controlled" civil war.

I'm not advocating for the opposite which is along the lines of authoritarianism, but it seems that "democracy" has taken this to an extreme level. It's as if all of the popularity contest stunts and vicious gossip from middle school have become enshrined in the political system.

I also have a hard time understanding how obviously declining senior citizens continue to be the best options for leadership.

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Also, I feel there is an inherent flaw in democracy that hasn't become obvious until we became hyper-connected. Or rather it's the combination of democracy and nation state. The US is the most obvious example of this but I bet that India has a lot of the same issues, i.e. that their citizens have lives and worldviews so disparate that they really maybe shouldn't be the same country. At some point borders were drawn on the circumference of control, right? Whatever a central government could control, it called a country. And that was largely due to cultural factors, how willing the population was to be controlled (in reasonably modern times of course). But with the internet people are realizing that they really have less in common within the borders of a country than they previously thought. Living in a European capital and speaking fluent English I probably have more in common, at least culturally/politically, with somebody living in Los Angeles than I do with somebody living in the countryside of my own country. But me and the that person in the countryside vote in the same elections.

It was super obvious, which is why elections occurred in even more hyper-connected settings. Election day meant drinking in the pub with your fellow landowners. If you were going to vote for bullshit, you had to stand up in front of your neighbors to do it.

There’s no reason why people can’t get along and agree on how things in their area should work. Under social contract theory, the whole point of the government by the people is to figure out how to get along with each other.

The Progressive Era began a hundred years later when we adopted the secret ballot. The system is perfect for capture by middle-class social reformers and muckrakers.

You’re right, I think this setup is showing its age. I literally never have to interact with or care about people living in the local countryside. The choice we face is do we try to reconcile with our neighbors or do we abandon social contract-driven government and use power centers to prop up a technocracy? Either could work.

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